Nationality: United StatesExecutive summary: Father of space telescopes

Military service: US Navy (Division of War Research, WWII)

Astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer pioneered the study of the gas and dust that form the interstellar medium. In 1946, early in his career, he was the first scientist to suggest putting a telescope in space, where it could operate without the interference of the planetís atmosphere -- a bold idea in a time before the first man-made satellite had been launched. In the 1960s he designed the Copernicus Orbiting Astronomical Observatory, a small satellite which orbited the Earth from 1972-81. In the 1990s until the very day of his death, he worked analyzing data received from Hubble, which was essentially the space-based telescope he had proposed five decades earlier. Spitzer studied under Henry Norris Russell, and in his long career he conducted important research in hot gases, plasma physics, stellar dynamics, thermonuclear fusion, and underwater sound. He is the namesake of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, launched in 2003, which still follows the Earth in its solar orbit.